Sons of Heaven

Craig Clunas is Professor Emeritus of the History of Art, University of Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy. His many books include Screen of Kings: Royal Art and Power in Ming China (Reaktion, 2013).

In this lavishly illustrated book, the author offers us a fresh view of the Ming as a dynastic enterprise. We emerge from it with a new sense of how the political arena was shaped by the workings of the sprawling clan at its heart, continuously sprouting new branches of imperial princes, calculating advantageous marriages, and frequently afflicted by brutal violence. It gives due weight to the importance of women as well as men, and of the dead as well as the living. Sons of Heaven is distinguished by its sense of the strangeness of the past, its eye for discreet but telling deployment of inter-disciplinary insights, and its engagement with the broader vistas of global history. - Alan Strathern, Professor of Global History, University of OxfordThe vivid details of the lives of Ming dynasty emperors (1368–1644), in contemporary records and rare illustrations, offer us today a unique view of China’s rulers, whose world, hidden in their palaces, could not be seen or imagined by their subjects. Craig Clunas’s exemplary but also extraordinary account reveals the texture of their daily encounters and observations, embedded in a period and culture of which we know still far too little. These emperors remind us too of the sophistication of their immense territory, as it began to enter the imaginations of Europeans. - Jessica Rawson, Professor of Chinese Art and Archaeology, University of OxfordThis innovative, beautifully illustrated book narrates the history of the Ming dynasty in an emperor-by-emperor format that interweaves personal, familial, and dynastic history. Rigorously researched, it uncovers how individual emperors shaped politics (and vice versa), thereby revealing the palace events and machinations of the Ming in Anglophone prose. - Jennifer Purtle, Associate Professor of Chinese and East Asian Art History, University of Toronto